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Red tape strangling Aust universities

Katina Curtis

Australian universities are spending millions of dollars and thousands of work days each year dealing with red tape, the sector's peak body says.

A new report shows a typical Australian university spent 2000 days in 2011 preparing 18 reports for one government department, out of 46 sets of data it required.

The cost of compiling the 18 reports came to $26 million across the university sector, the PhillipsKPA report says.

The report, released on Thursday, comes five years after then-education minister Julia Gillard promised the Labor government "will be taking the foot of government off the throat of our universities".

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Data reporting costs universities as much as $30 for every $1000 of funding, and between $3000 to $8000 per grant.

"What this report shows, and bearing in mind that it only addresses a part of one portfolio, is that the university sector is groaning under the weight of an ever increasing regulatory and reporting load," Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson said.

"The dead weight of unnecessary, redundant and duplicative regulation and reporting not only leads to waste in the allocation of university and government resources, it also diverts substantial funds away from the core business of universities - teaching, scholarship and research," Ms Robinson said.

The report, commissioned by the federal tertiary education department, recommended the creation of a central list and timetable of the different reporting requirements.

This would help universities and help cut red tape.

Ultimately, it said there should be a single national body for collection of higher education data.

Universities Australia wants the Productivity Commission to undertake a full review of university regulation and reporting that covers all government agencies.

Universities now have to report data regularly to bodies including the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the Australian Skills Quality Authority, state governments, the Australian Research Council, the immigration department, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and a range of other agencies who want to know different things.